1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems used to manage customer accounts within telecommunications systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is well known that the telecommunications industry is extremely competitive. As such, telecommunications companies often have to introduce new systems and corresponding services to attract and maintain customers. However, with each new system and corresponding service that is introduced to customers in the telecommunications marketplace, a host of infrastructure issues centered around customer account management and the like is realized. As such, to effectively bring new telecommunications services to market quickly (e.g., long distance services, cellular telephony services, paging services, Internet services, etc.), telecommunications companies must engineer corresponding new and enhanced customer account management systems to manage new and existing customer accounts in ways that model particular business strategies.
In the past, to bring new telecommunications services to market, companies resorted to developing dedicated data processing systems that did not allow for easy service customer portfolio expansion. Each new telecommunications service that was offered required a new, dedicated customer account management system. In turn, each new customer account management system required significant resources and time to properly implement and deploy. As such, telecommunications companies often were not able to effectively and efficiently bring new services to market and, as a result, were not able to effectively compete in the telecommunications marketplace.
In addition to having to design and implement new, dedicated customer account management systems to support each new service, telecommunications companies have found themselves operating a host of disparate, unconnected data processing systems to manage customer accounts associated with a variety of service offerings. Such disparate systems also often frustrate customers who maintain more than one service account and either must receive a corresponding number of billing statements or engage in customer service activities for each individual account. Additionally, in many cases, telecommunications companies have found themselves maintaining older legacy systems that, for one reason or another, are based on technologies that are no longer current. Such out-of-date systems often embody architectures that are quite burdensome to maintain. Yet, despite the burdens associated with operating older, dedicated customer account management systems, telecommunications companies must continue to maintain existing data system in order to support their service offerings and, ultimately, their customers.
As such, to address the problems associated with implementing new and operatively disparate systems to manage customer accounts and support a variety of telecommunications services, companies have employed teams of personnel and expended significant resources to build bridging systems to couple and attempt to integrate their system. Such bridging systems have been implemented to allow consolidated customer service account management, provide consolidated billing statements, and to allow internal processing for forecasting and creating add-on sales opportunities. Although such bridging systems allow limited cross referencing of account information, they merely solve particular data consolidation needs among systems that are already known and implemented. Such dedicated bridging systems do not easily allow for service offering expansion and enhancement and do not contemplate future commercial telecommunications offerings. In essence, such bridging systems attempt to solve business needs by statically providing particular technical solutions. As such, telecommunications companies have found themselves in a vicious cycle of responding to the needs of the marketplace and having to develop systems that can manage customer accounts in the context of new and improved telecommunications services.
Thus there exists a need to provide an improved account management system that can adapt to changing market needs by allowing fast integration of new telecommunication services and which, at the same time, allows seamless integration among legacy telecommunications account management systems. To be viable, such a system must be able to support telecommunications systems and services that have particular account management needs that are based on corresponding particular business rules. Finally, such a system must be based on an integration paradigm that can take advantage of modern computer design principles such as those supported by object-oriented techniques and which encapsulate business rules in an object-oriented or other similar environment.